Oh the Birthday Festivities!

We have a one year old. No ifs, ands, or buts, he is one. No matter how much we want to squish him back down into his newborn size and no matter how much trouble we have remembering just exactly how small that was.. He just keeps getting bigger.

And he is awesome.

The Aedster made his debut as a one year old on the 30th of August and got to do all kinds of big kid things..

First, he got to lick the beaters Mama used to make some special frosting for his birthday cupcakes.


The cupcakes turned out nice and cute, and I knew he was going to love them! Banana chocolate chip with a pre-approved (see: beater-licking) cream cheese frosting.


We had a nice little spread of gifts that we had gotten for him earlier in the summer and were anxious to see if he would enjoy opening his gifts. (Can you guess who wrapped them? :)


But first! The big boy got to blow out his ‘candle’ (which may or may not have actually been a match) and dive into his yummy cupcakes.. the likes of which had never tickled his taste buds.


The climax? Less than climactic. He didn’t like them! He still loved the frosting, but he’d take a bite of the cupcake and then make all kinds of faces as he swallowed. He settled on repeatedly putting the cupcake into his mouth, but not taking any bites! So funny! He also absolutely refused to put the chunks of cake down despite the fact that he was not eating them. At one point, Ian tried to adjust one of the chunks in his hand and he totally freaked out. A kid of passions is what he is. Just like his father.

On to the presents!


He looks interested, right? That lasted for all of 3 seconds until he had opened the first gift and then decided he had better things to do. We managed to coax him back over while we essentially unwrapped the gifts for him. The highlights were definitely his very own flashlight and the boulders that came with his Little People construction set.



(He wanted to eat that boulder so bad! Can you blame him? This was right before dinner, after all..)

After our little family birthday celebration, we had a bigger double birthday party for Aed and Ellie since their birthdays are so close together. It turned out really nicely and we had so much fun with everyone who came.

Joy provided us with some lovely decorations to make things a little more festive..



And we had a great spread of food.


I realized that I didn’t take a picture with all the food actually opened and ready for eating, so you’ll just have to imagine things like fruits and veggies and dips surrounding the cakes instead of tupperware lids.

Speaking of the cakes.. my first endeavor into slightly complicated cake decorating! I had several ideas in mind and I knew that regardless of which one I settled on, I was going to be molding something. I decided to use gum paste this time.. for no particular reason, really.

So, we went with a bird theme for our little chirpers, and I had so much fun planning and executing the actual cakes.



The frosting is a delicious buttercream.. maybe not the best idea to frost a chocolate cake with light icing, but live and learn. I made a little cookie cutter out of a foil plate I had and cut these birds from gum paste for the big cake.



Then I made each one year old their own little cake for digging into. Those molded birds were kind of a nightmare. The gum paste didn’t form quite as easily as I had expected it to, so I had to call over my hot-handed assistant to help. His warm hands got the paste nice and smooth so it could be molded a little less cracky than what I was able to do, so I have decided two things. One.. if I ever go into the cake decorating business, he will be hired as my permanent hot-handed assistant (especially since we were doing this laaaate into the night and he did it willingly and complained a bajillion times less than I did). And two.. I’m going to try working with fondant next time to see if my not-so-hot-hands can handle it better.

Regardless, I think they turned out really cute, and I was really surprised at how satisfying it was to see them all put together. Though, slightly disappointing was how quickly they disappeared! The fruits of my (our) labor were short lived :)

So the guests started arriving and the babies started staring at each other.




Aed was on cloud nine with all the balloons to chase around on the floor.


Joy found Pooh party hats and we had just the right number to adorn each baby’s (and Jonah’s!) head with one.


Things were going well..


And then we had one give into the chaos and express her opinion. Notice the number of babies showing their concern for her.. And then there’s Aed.

The birthday babies!


Ellie is starting to look a little concerned and Aed is about to take off, so we moved on with the festivities.

We got them in their special chairs and got the cakes ready.

In the meantime, Aed found out what happens when you pull a hat on an elastic string really far away from your face and then let go of it..


He wasn’t so please with the outcome.

Hats aside, they were ready for some action! Aed was trying to pull everything off the table, and Ellie was being her cute self.


We sang, helped them blow out their candles, then gave them the go ahead to dig right in!



Aed’s response to the cake was to first put his fingers in the frosting, trying to grab a chunk, I assume. When he found the cake was too dense to do that, he just sat there with his mouth open, leaning forward, hoping the cake would get into his mouth. I obliged him and held it within reach of his mouth..


And he enthusiastically shoved his face into it, taking the biggest bites he could get!

Ellie did some nice damage to her cake as well!


Oh how I wish we could read their minds..

We opened a few more presents before Aed decided (once again) he wasn’t all that into present-opening (needless to say, we didn’t bother wrapping the rest of his gifts) and went outside to play with Daddy.


We are so thankful for our crazy little big boy. We had so much fun celebrating with the Sonjus and everyone else that came to the party, and are so thankful for the community we have here – especially at times like these when the distance from loved ones is felt that much more. We are praising the Lord for bringing us through our first year with Aed with so much growth and fruit, and pray that the next year will be even more fruitful.